Chapin: Democracy got me. A looked very good, but so did D. I disagree that D is ruled out by the first sentence since it links back to the evidence directly. It says that moderate parties who consider extremist parties a serious threat, and that links to "won only when moderate parties were preoccupied". So it is not unreasonable to stay that moderate parties who were aware of a threat by extremist would set aside differences to deal with that. The fist sentence of D is perfectly reasonable and does not rule it out as a sufficient condition.

What rules D out, and I did not consider it carefully enough until I saw that I got the choice wrong, so went back with my magnifying glass, is the word Sometimes. If moderate parties only Sometimes set aside differences to deal with a serious threat, then At Least Once they do not, so the claim "pose NO threat" is not satisfied.

And here is the nuance of LSAT choices. They will lead you down the garden path with a perfectly reasonable choice but leave just one little stone in the path, as single word, to trip you up.

It is an interesting skill to apply and for me very hard to apply quickly, probably due to lack of training?? I get more answers wrong due to the single word problem.

If "Sometimes" were removed from D would it be sufficient? Kevin, I think it would. Would it be any less strong than A? I think not. I thought they were both right (due to my word mistake) but reasoned that "the lsat hates a high score so put a very tempting answer in A hoping you'd never get to D. Not a good strategy.

Having dissected this problem it is apparent that it must be one of the easier SA questions, almost a giveaway with A being so obviously correct.

Griley:Democracy..

Untimed I cannot keep all those concepts in my head. I had to diagram this one (and others) because the diagram allows me to keep track of the arguments and see the gap. But in Griley there was a new wrinkle if diagraming that threw me off and made it impossible to do a clean diagram.

New idea here, probably obvious to many, but not me when trying to work this out. New Rule: Attributes, once ascribed to entities, follow the entity through the argument and can, and probably should, be restated each time the entity appears in the argument. Here is a simple example:

Jane, who has blond hair but prefers to die it brown...

Then later on,

Jane will not shop at The Corner Salon

And to link them with some other argument about the corner solon you have to rethink that conclusion as..

Jane (who prefers brown hair) will not shop at The Corner Salon.

Cruddy example. I'm not a test writer, but you get the idea. Keep the attribute attached to the entity. Once you consider it, perhaps like me, you will say, 'Of course dummy, that's just how the world works".

But, I've had to train myself to stop injecting the "real world" into LSAT questions because often the writers use our knowledge of the real world to dupe us into a wrong answer. AND in the previous (sports salaries) example Kevin warned agianst bringing in your own ideas. But apparently, as shown by Griley, in the case of attributes, we can keep them attached to the entity to which they were previously attributed.

So

Griley does not believe in Democracy, becomes...

Griley (ArtPopular -> ~Good) -> ~Democracy

That argument link with the conclusion that he does not have a high regard for the wisdom of the masses.

That was my valuable takeaway from this problem...

Trying to diagram this one was futile...

Kevin, I have been in business for decades, worked with 20+ lawyers, read and worked to modify tens to a hundred legal documents and contracts. My father, uncle and two grandfathers were attorneys. So by way of experience, I have a ton of exposure to the legal system.

I'm gonna call BS on one attribute of the LSAT; that of intentionally obscuring language in both the stimulus and choices. That just does not happen when lawyers are paid for legal work. Lawyers who've presented me with confusing language have been sent back to do better, or I found another lawyer. Having spent more than $3,000,000 on attorney's fees over the years you can be assured that I knew what I was paying for and demanded quality work. Never, ever, have I encountered such intentionally confusing language in any legal document as we are told we must decode on the LSAT. And yes, that includes documents prepared by adversarial parties to a deal. I'd reject them until they were clearly written.

Thus, although the LSAT creates this unreal environment and challenge to hold down scores on the exam, it has NO bearing or relevance to what a lawyer does. I am asking myself, why spend so much of my valuable time learning a skill which has no value in the real world, either as a lawyer or a consumer of retail law? The only answer is, I am wasting my time as a life learner as far as the obfuscating language goes and investing only in passing a test.

And as for this business of time and working under the pressure of time. Very rarely has that been the case. Far from it. Parties to agreements require time to fully understand and clarify agreements. As plaintiff in one of the largest Intellectual Property lawsuits ongoing in 2005, it was resolved with the sale of a company and only 30 days to close. The financial and organization due diligence was pressured, but the legal documents were not.

Lawyers are paid by the hour, as far as my experience goes. If a lawyer brought me a low invoice and poorly written work, I'd give him one opportunity to adjust his priorities. So that is another unreality of the LSAT. In testing under time pressure, it is not measuring proficiency fully, and productivity fully, it is compromising the measurement of proficiency by forcing test takers to fail to apply the full measure of their intellect to each problem. Either the work is rushed or the work is not done because the time ran out. The structure of the test hides proficiency.

Perhaps if a lawyer works for a contingent fee chasing firm that requires fast turnover of document production and filings, the productivity/proficiency combination rises to the fore. Even then, a far better measure would be to allow unlimited time but report both proficiency (score) and time. The nuanced nature of the student's strengths and weaknesses would be exposed and could be evaluated for admissions and work. Even at the worst ambulance chaser must do adequate work. Like the old business adage, "We are losing money on each unit, but we are making it up in volume.", well, no...

Having been at this for months now I have mastered many of the skills required to work out the logic, flaws and other worthwhile aspects of this test, but I continue to be frustrated and annoyed at the requirement to spend time trying to understand what the writer was saying, but intentionally obscured.

Decoding poorly written text is not a valuable skill in any theater of the legal profession to which I've been exposed.

It might be worthwhile to point out that taking the contrapositives of both A and B then testing those in place will provide a clear understanding of why the sufficient and necessary conditions are swapped in A.

Missing step?

Wait, wait wait...

Premise given:

If SelfInterst Then Not Generous

SI -> ~G

G -> -SI If Generous the Not SelfInterst

The nasty trick here is that a billion dollar donation would be reasonable considered generous by any measure, so its a REAL LIFE generous act. However, the damn LSAT often messes with me by filling my mind with real life nonsense to mask understanding the real argument from me, which in this case is..

Not SelfInterest then Generous, which cannot be concluded from either of the valid forms of the first argument.

So perhaps the REAL TRICK (psychological) here, and elsewhere, is to cross out all real world meaning. So just ignore or cross out the sentence "This business owner donated a billion to a charity" and focus only on Not SelfInterest Thus Charity

~SI -> G One of the invalid foms.

@nr No. Your translation from words to symbols is not correct.

Try this....

Not X unless Y is equivalent to X only if Y.

The rule for that conversion is to negate the antecedent and substitute Only If for Unless.

Not Daytime Unless BirdsSing translates to

Not (Not Daytime) Only If BirdSing

Daytime Only If BirdSing

And you can substitute Then for Only If, so If X Then Y

If Daytime then Birdsing

SkyBlue Only If Datime is If SkyBlue then Daytime

You can see how they combine

If SkyBlue Then DayTime Then BirdsSing

If SkyBlue Then BirdSiing

For me, the key step is to never reason with Unless, but to always do the Unless/OnlyIf translation first. Then OnlyIf/Then synonym swap to put everything in standard language, which is easier to "think" about; keep in my head without a meltdown.

Except that is not what the stimulus of the problem was. In the problem you had to work out that "every student who attended every class got a grade of B- or higher". To do so meant understanding that students who attended every calls were excluded from the grade of less than B-, which is a bit mind melting if you are trying to work that out from the words. You concluding example would be more relevant if you showed how to go from the exact stimulus to the conclusion. You skipped a step and I think that it is those implicit (other side of the coin) relationships that trip up beginners and those under pressure. Perhaps this is why only those in the 97th percentile get this question right.

Kevin Lin teaches it like this....

Diagraming with shapes is very fast. If I try to keep these all/most/some in my head they quickly melt it. But if I draw boxes that overlap and contain the appropriate labels the relationships and overlaps are easy to see. For me, that is the difference between a 40 second solution to this problem and a 4 minute guess.

For example, on this question, the stick people don't overlap. Draw one box for All Classes. Draw a second box, most of which is inside the All Classes box and some of which is outside it. The draw another box which is inside the Students box, but does not overlap into the All Classes box, label that All < B-. Now you can easily see that none of the Students inside All Classes could have gotten < B-, so the valid inference All of the Students who attended All Classes (box inside All Classes) are excluded from < B- (B- can only exist outside All Classes) so must have got a B- or better.

That I can do fast. See Kevin Lin video on Overlapping Quantities

Diagraming with shapes is very fast. If I try to keep these all/most/some in my head they quickly melt it. But if I draw boxes that overlap and contain the appropriate labels the relationships and overlaps are easy to see. For me, that is the difference between a 40 second solution to this problem and a 4 minute guess.

For example, on this question, the stick people don't overlap. Draw one box for All Classes. Draw a second box, most of which is inside the All Classes box and some of which is outside it. The draw another box which is inside the Students box, but does not overlap into the All Classes box, label that All < B-. Now you can easily see that none of the Students inside All Classes could have gotten < B-, so the valid inference All of the Students who attended All Classes (box inside All Classes) are excluded from < B- (B- can only exist outside All Classes) so must have got a B- or better.

Lin did two great videos on this.

@mackenzie48 Diagraming with shapes is very fast. If I try to keep these all/most/some in my head they quickly melt it. But if I draw boxes that overlap and contain the appropriate labels the relationships and overlaps are easy to see. For me, that is the difference between a 40 second solution to this problem and a 4 minute guess.

For example, on this question, the stick people don't overlap. Draw one box for All Classes. Draw a second box, most of which is inside the All Classes box and some of which is outside it. The draw another box which is inside the Students box, but does not overlap into the All Classes box, label that All < B-. Now you can easily see that none of the Students inside All Classes could have gotten < B-, so the valid inference All of the Students who attended All Classes (box inside All Classes) are excluded from < B- (B- can only exist outside All Classes) so must have got a B- or better.

That I can do fast. So can you!